Re: Right-Branching vs. Left-Branching

Rob Haden <magwich78@Y...> wrote:

> SOV word-order, at least in declarative sentences, is the largest syntactic
> type in the world.  I think SVO languages, many of which are Indo-European,
> are over-represented due to their widespreadness (new word?).  If we remove
> such biases, SOV clearly comes out on top.
Aha. Now it comes back to me. If you go by number of individual languages, SVO
comes out ahead. But if you go by language GROUPS then SOV wins by a long shot.

> Rick Morneau's "Lexical Semantics"
> (http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/lexical_semantics.html) or one of his other
> articles is where I read that right-branching syntax is inherently easier
> for people and computers to parse.
Did a search and found it near the bottom of the article. Yep, that's all he says.
"Right-branching languages are inherently easier to parse for both computers
and humans."

Lacking any kind of proof, I would think that this is a purely personal viewpoint. It
may be accurate for computers, but probably because computer programming
languages are mostly invented by English speakers or at least speakers of
primarily right-branching languages (I'm guessing), and read left to right.

About the term "right-branching" anyway. Just because WE write (and draw tree
diagrams) from left to right doesn't mean "right-branching" is a universally
intuitive term. "Head-initial" or "head-final" would be more accurate.

  However, I noticed that this flies in
> the face of evidence that a majority of the world's languages are SOV.  I
> mean, if VSO syntax was inherently easier to parse, one would think that
> VSO would be the largest syntactic category.  But it isn't.
>
> >Early linguistics: all languages are essentially just like Latin.
> >Chomskyan linguistics: all languages are essentially just like English, if
> >you build enough trees and diagrams and explain them in complicated enough
> >terms.
> >
> >:)
>
> LOL.  I'm hardly a professional linguist (!), but it seems that Chomsky has
> added a lot of techno-jumbo (another new word/phrase?) to that science.
One of my favourite profs was schooled in Chomskyan linguistics and then left
because it was so far removed from the real world and so full of itself.

Heather

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